It took Clark weeks to reconcile with himself the fact that, while he’d been Superman all along, he had been absolutely powerless to save himself. He still instinctively blamed the absent hero for his imprisonment, and it was difficult to admit to himself that he was the missing hero. Try as he might, he could not remember how or why he’d come to be without his powers. Kryptonite seemed the likely culprit, of course, as Lois had pointed out. And it would explain the unshaped feeling of having been hurt during his pre-asylum days. But, for the life of him, he had no recollection of where he’d been, who had hurt him, or to what purpose he’d been forcibly stripped of his true identity of Clark Kent.
During that time, he often slipped out of the house after Lois went to work. He found a nice, secluded clearing in the woods of upstate New Troy, far from any roads, buildings, or other watchful eyes. He was always careful to fly fast enough to avoid being seen, but slow enough not to break the sound barrier. He didn’t want people to think Superman had returned, mostly because Superman hadn’t. Clark found himself wondering sometimes if Superman ever would. He could remember bits and pieces of his work while wearing the bright blue and red suit. He could remember how good, how fulfilling it had been to make a rescue. He remembered the sense of purpose it had given him whenever he’d been able to use his powers to save a life or put a criminal behind bars.
But that had been a long, long time ago. Clark hadn’t been sure, at first, that he could remember how to use half of his abilities. So, he would sneak off to the woods and practice in as safe an environment as he could, where his identity could remain protected and where he stood no chance of accidentally incinerating a random passerby with out of control heat vision. Day after day, he would spend hours alone, testing his limits bit by incremental bit, until he was certain he could remember how to unleash the subconscious restraint he kept on each potentially devastating ability, and that he could keep control even in the most extreme upper limit of each power.
He needn’t have worried. As each passing day slipped by, he found that reaching for his powers came naturally to him, as easy to remember and execute as riding a bike. In the evenings, with both his mother’s and Lois’ blessings, he would fly out to his childhood home in Kansas and transport boxes and bags and various pieces of furniture to his mother’s new, modest little house in Metropolis.
“I’m getting too old to work the farm like I used to,” she’d told him the day after he’d rediscovered his super side.
“I can do it for you,” he’d pressed, eager to give her a reason to keep the farm. “You know I could do all the planting and harvesting and tilling and the rest in minutes. You’d never have to worry about things,” he’d told her, even though his powers had been as of yet untested.
But she’d shaken her head. “I love that farm, you know that. But it’s just not the same without your father. And I feel better being close to you anyway.”
“I’m always close by,” Clark had argued. “So long as I have my speed and my flight.”
“Your father and I always planned to move to Metropolis,” she’d confided. “Once you’d decided this was your home, we always knew we’d wind up here in our retirement. Of course, we never thought the circumstances would turn out like this,” she’d admitted, her palms upturned with an unmoving shrug.
It hadn’t taken a clairvoyant to see that she’d meant she’d always thought Clark might find someone, settle down, get married, and raise a family.
“Besides,” she’d continued before he could comment, “Dustin and Randy Irig are more than a perfect choice to take over the land. They’ve done amazing things with Wayne’s old farm. They’ll take care of ours too,” she’d said, her voice full of conviction and devoid of remorse.
That had been the end of the discussion. She would hear no more on the subject and would entertain no attempts to get her to change her mind. What was done, was done. Clark reluctantly let it go, and focused instead on providing a fast, reliable, and cautious moving service to bring all of Martha’s possessions to her humble new abode. And, the more he carried through the air under the dark cover of night, the more he had to admit that it was a comfort to have her close by while he still tried to fill in the ever-shrinking number of gaps in his memory.
He had a lot of time to himself during those flights and he used them to think. Well, except for the first one. He was still figuring out his route then and had been so focused on the landscape below that he’d flown smack-dab into the center of an electrical storm on his way over Cleveland. He’d still picked up the dresser his mother had asked for, but he’d returned to Metropolis looking like a marshmallow that had been put too close to a bonfire and went aflame. After that, he’d been more careful and a lot more familiar with the route he needed to take. And that’s when he would let his mind wander.
Mostly, his thoughts strayed to Superman.
How could they not, when he was flying up above the world?
A world he only partially recognized. A world he was still relearning. A world that had moved on, changed, and evolved while he’d been stuck firmly in the past. A world which, he hoped, held a potential future with Lois, if only he could finally reclaim the last missing pieces of his memory.
Superman.
He thought of it now as he made his way over the ribbon-thin roads far beneath him on his way to the old farmhouse. It was his fifteenth trip of the night as he’d toted boxes of art supplies and books and various knickknacks to Metropolis. He was on his way now to transport his father’s old high-backed armchair, and the thought made him incredibly sad. It was haunting enough to watch the house he’d grown up in grow steadily emptier. The echoes within the rooms that sent his footsteps back to his own ears were eerie. But this was different. This was heart-wrenching, to know that Jonathan Kent would never sit in his chair again, in its new spot by the tidy faux fireplace in the tight little living room in Metropolis. It slowed his pace considerably as he tried to stave off the inevitable.
Funny, how this one trip is taking me longer than all the others combined, he thought sourly.
He detoured then, as Smallville came into view and aimed for the cemetery instead of the house. He landed with whisper-quietness on the stubbornly green grass, despite the definite chill in the air as autumn moved inexorably closer to winter. So far, he hadn’t visited his father’s grave, despite asking his mother where, exactly, in the cemetery his father’s remains had been laid to rest. Visiting the site would have made it all too real. But now Clark felt compelled to cement that reality into existence and try to make peace with the fact that he’d been robbed of the last years of his father’s life. All those missed opportunities to hear his father’s sometimes gruff, but always supportive advice. All those unsaid goodbyes. All those little memories of his father’s gentle chuckle, his booming belly laugh, the way Jonathan’s eyes would twinkle in amusement, the way he’d absently wipe at his glasses when he was in deep thought.
Worst of all, Jonathan Kent had died never knowing that his son was still alive.
Clark sighed heavily as he looked around at the area that spread out around his father’s tombstone. A massive maple tree still held a few stubborn, brown leaves. Clark judged that in the summer, the tree’s branches would just barely shade the edges of his dad’s grave, which suited Clark just fine. His dad had been a lover of working and playing in the bright sunshine. Behind the grave, maybe a hundred and fifty feet away, was a little pond. Clark’s sharp night vision picked out the flash of silver scales beneath the water as he zoomed in on the surface. That made Clark smile bittersweetly. He might not have had all his memories back just yet, but he could remember how much his dad had loved fishing, and, by extension, how much he himself had enjoyed it, simply because it was something that his father had loved.
“It’s a beautiful spot, Dad,” he murmured so lightly even the slight breeze couldn’t carry the sound away. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to visit. I…I wasn’t sure I was ready for it before now. I wish I had come. I wanted you to know that…I’m okay. I will be okay. I may not be completely back to my old self, but Mom and Lois have been amazing at helping me to get back to who I used to be.”
He ran his fingertips over the engraved lettering on the front of the tombstone, which stated simply in a beautifully flowing script: Jonathan Kent, Devoted Husband and Loving Father. And, of course, the dates that marked the beginning and end of his life. Clark ignored the dates and stared in contemplation at the dash between them.
“I remember hearing or reading something once,” he told his father’s final resting place as he dragged his fingers away from the words and ran them, instead, over the top of the highly polished, extremely smooth gray granite. “I don’t remember the exact wording – surprise, surprise,” he added bitterly, “but it talked about the dash between the dates on a gravestone. How it represents an entire lifetime. How it’s the most meaningful mark on the entire piece of stone. I wish I hadn’t missed out on the last years of your life. I wish I could see you one last time. I’d tell you how much I miss you. How much I love you, Dad. How much I still need you.” He closed his eyes against the pinpricks of tears in his eyes until he was certain he’d banished them from existence. “I’ll take care of Mom, you know that. I just…I hope you know that we’re okay, all of us. Sometimes, I wonder if you didn’t somehow have a cosmic hand in my rescue. Maybe you sent Bruce to where I was. I don’t know,” he continued, shaking his head.
He looked up at the star-filled expanse of sky above him. “I just wanted to say thank you for that. I promise I’ll make you proud of me…of this second chance I’ve been given…even if I don’t necessarily deserve it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I guess everyone does. But…sometimes I wonder why I’ve been given this miraculous recovery from what should have rendered me almost catatonic and a blank slate for the rest of my life. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Anyone else would have suffered permanent brain damage by going through the things I did. And, while I’m grateful to get my life back, it doesn’t seem fair that after all of that electroshock torture I went through, that I still got some kind of cosmic reset so I could go about my life again.”
He rifled his hand through his hair as he fought to master both his emotions and his train of thought. Just thinking about how insanely blessed he’d been to possess the ability to heal his barbequed brain made him feel queasy when he knew no one else on Earth would even have it so lucky. They would be lost forever, not just a decade or two.
“I should probably get going. I don’t want to worry Mom,” he told his father. “I promise I’ll be back when I can.”
Then, silently, he rose ever upwards until he was nothing more than a black speck against an even blacker sky. In a few heartbeats he was at the farm, unlocking the door and grabbing his father’s chair. On an impulse, he stacked the coffee table longways across the arms of the chair, figuring he could save himself a trip and knowing that the added weight would be negligible, on par with that of a fly landing on the chair thanks to the inhuman strength he possessed.
His mind slid back to Superman as he flew back home to Metropolis, even though he would have done just about anything to be devoid of any and all thoughts at that moment in time. He wondered if he would ever take up the mantel of the superhero again. A part of him was convinced Superman should stay dead in the public’s eye. A greater part of him was revolted by the idea of wearing the blue and red again; not after wearing it day in and day out and being electrocuted for the simple knowledge that he was Superman, and not some delusional, possibly self-destructive, sorry excuse for a man.
“The public won’t accept me if I go back to being Superman,” he reasoned to the moon, which seemed to beckon him ever eastward as he made his way home. “And even if they did, there’s no way I could ever explain Superman’s long absence in a satisfactory way. There would be too many questions. People might realize that Superman was gone just long enough for Clark Kent to recover from his tragic ordeal.”
He frowned, not completely happy with the possibility of giving up his super side for good. But the option of becoming a new superhero didn’t sit at all well with him. For one thing, it would mean re-establishing trust with the public, hoping against hope they would accept, rather than reject the powerful being in their midst. For another, he’d have to figure out which powers to use and which to pretend that he didn’t have; a major point to separate himself from Superman, and easily forgettable in the heat of the moment when a life was at stake. And then, of course, there was the matter of his looks. Lois had shown him pictures they’d taken together when he’d first moved to Metropolis, secured a job with the Daily Planet, and then befriended the woman he’d fallen in love with at first sight. Twenty years hadn’t done much to age him – nor had it to Lois, to be honest. He couldn’t be a new hero if he looked exactly like Superman. And wearing a mask was simply out of the question.
“I wish I could talk this out with you, Dad,” he muttered under his breath. “You always had a way of cutting straight to the heart of a problem and helping me see what I should do. You never told me what to do. It was always my decision. But I always knew it was the right one after I’d talked to you about it.” He thought for a moment. “I remember how you urged me to tell Lois about my feelings before she got mixed up with Lex Luthor. I didn’t listen and the next thing I knew, he was asking her to marry him. I was so desperate to stop the wedding and…”
In a flash, it all came rushing back to him. Meeting Luthor in his wine cellar. The cage. The Kryptonite that Luthor could control with the push of a button. Promises to kill his parents if Clark denied that he was Superman. His manservant – Nigel, if Clark was remembering clearly – hurting him…breaking fingers, snapping toes, taking a mallet to his wrists and ankles…
Clark Kent never existed. You are Superman. You are not and have never been Clark Kent.
Clark froze as he clearly heard the reptilian voice of Lex Luthor croon.
I’m enjoying chipping away at you, eroding what you used to be, erasing you from memory, just as you tried to do to me.
Clark screamed, wobbled in the air, nearly went crashing to the Earth, and lost his grip on the chair as he went completely hollow inside. Every bone seemed to go to jelly, every nerve was seared away to leave him unable to move for a small eternity. A cold wave of nausea roiled in his stomach and leached out to drench his entire body in a freezing sweat. It was only when he heard the blare of a horn far below him and to his right that he snapped out of his trance-like state. Swiftly, he dove down to grab the armchair, rescuing it neatly as he scooped it up in his arms. The coffee table had no such luck. In his distracted state, Clark didn’t realize he hadn’t grabbed it along with the chair. The table went whistling downward like an angry boulder and smashed to pieces about twelve feet away from the highway and right in front of the “Welcome to Chicago!” sign.
“Great,” he groaned to himself. “Mom’s going to kill me.”
But luck was, perhaps, on his side once again. No one had been around to witness the crash. No one, not even an errant furry creature, had been harmed by the flying debris that had resulted from the crash, and, in the morning, the baffled local authorities, in an effort to focus on more important things, figured the whole thing had to have been staged by some bored teenagers or young adults in some kind of bizarre prank that no one understood.
He hardly took note of the lack of flattened people and creatures as his world spun, went upside down, and turned inside out. He landed next to the carnage that had once been the table and woozily walked a dozen or so feet away. Carefully setting down the chair, he doubled over and retched in a thick, tangled patch of half-dead weeds. He knew he was right about it all. About his imprisonment, about Luthor, about the asinine attempt to “erase” both Clark and Superman from history.
“You should have killed me outright, Luthor,” he growled to himself as he picked up the chair and rose into the sky once more. “I’m a dangerous enemy to leave alive.”
***
“Clark! There you are!” Martha said with an obvious sigh of relief as he carried the chair through the doorway and into her new house. “We were getting worried.”
He nodded as wrangled the chair into the spot Martha had pointed out to him earlier. With a pang in his heart, he realized that it was on the same side of the living room that his father had always sat in. “I know, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s just…moving Dad’s stuff, knowing that I never got to say goodbye…I couldn’t find it in me to move as fast as I did on the other trips,” he confided.
He suddenly felt very old and very tired. He wanted nothing more than to collapse and not think for a while. But he couldn’t bring himself to sit in his dad’s chair, not yet, at any rate. It felt as wrong as a pauper sitting on the king’s throne and trying to pass himself off as lord and master. He opted to remain standing.
“You look beat,” Lois said, looking up from where she’d been helping Martha organize all her crafting supplies. “Are you okay?”
“No,” he breathed uncertainly. “I’m not.”
The two women’s brows creased in concern in roughly the same second and in roughly the same look.
“Tea?” Martha asked out of habit.
Clark nodded. “Oolong, if you have it.”
“Of course I do,” she smiled at him.
“Thanks, Mom. Uh…I have a confession to make,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck while his flesh went scarlet in a blush. “I tried to bring back more than just the chair. I had the coffee table with me.”
Martha peered at him curiously. “Had?” she asked softly.
“I, uh, kind of owe you a new table,” he continued with downcast eyes like a child caught red-handed doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. “I kind of…dropped it. At the border of Chicago. And, well, it’s fair to say that it doesn’t really even look like a table anymore. More like an unfortunate pile of really big toothpicks.”
Martha’s eyes widened, but she didn’t appear to be upset by the news. Surprised, more like it.
“I know, I’m usually a bit more careful,” Clark went on.
She held up a hand to stop him. “Accidents happen. It’s not a big deal. Besides, that table came to us as a hand-me-down after we got married, from my cousin’s neighbor’s sister.” She waved her hand dismissively as she explained her apathy over the destroyed coffee table. “She lived in town and we knew each other a little. She and her husband were getting rid of some of their old furniture. Your father and I were newlyweds with very little money so we didn’t turn down the offer,” Martha explained as she led the way into the kitchen. She chuckled a little to herself as she reminisced.
“I always did hate that table but somehow we never got around to replacing it. There were always more pressing issues – the leaky roof, the burst water main, droughts so bad we had to borrow money from the bank just to keep food on the table, good harvests when we took whatever excess money we’d made and funneled it back to paying off those loans,” she said, ticking the points off on her fingers and throwing a warm smile at him, “a son with super abilities. We just kind of forgot about the stupid table after a while.” She ended with a casual shrug as she reached the stove in the kitchen.
“Well…I guess I’m glad to hear that,” Clark said with a half-hearted chuckle as he reached the kitchen table and sat down heavily. “There was…a bit more to my delay in getting back with the chair though,” he admitted after a moment. “I…made a stop. To see Dad.”
“Oh, honey,” Martha said sadly, knowing or guessing how much that had hurt him, to see his father’s grave. She took him in her arms in a hug.
“I’m sorry, Clark,” Lois said, coming up alongside him and rubbing his arm affectionately. “You shouldn’t have gone alone. Martha or I should have been there for you.”
Clark shook his head as his mother released him and then filled the tea kettle. “It wasn’t something I’d planned. It just sort of happened, spur of the moment. I’ve been avoiding it since I got my powers back and…seeing it…” He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “It made it feel so…real.” It wasn’t exactly the word he was looking for, but it was close enough.
Lois gave him a hug. He let himself sink into her embrace, drawing strength from her love. She kissed the side of his head, then pulled back as if shocked that she’d been so bold. Her cheeks bloomed pink in a blush, and he thought maybe it stemmed from having Martha in the room with them. After all, they’d cuddled together often enough in the privacy of Lois’ house.
“I’m still sorry you had to do that alone,” she told him.
“I don’t know…” he wavered. “I think I needed to do it on my own. It’s not that I wouldn’t have appreciated you being there, because I would have. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t…well…have an audience,” he said as compassionately as he could. But inside, he was at a near panic from his resurfaced memories.
He shook his head again and watched as his mother prepared mugs with tea bags, then brought them over to the table. She returned with a small glass pitcher of milk, the sugar bowl, spoons, and dessert plates. Clark took them all from her and set the table for the three of them while his mother busied herself with putting out some fresh sugar cookies on a fourth plate. Clark inhaled deeply; they smelled heavenly.
“I…” He paused and swallowed hard. “I hate to say it but…I think I needed to see Dad’s grave for…more than just my own peace of mind. Being there…then going to get his chair…it made me think a lot about him. Things I haven’t thought about or remembered in a while.”
The tea kettle started to whistle and Martha turned to turn off the stove. Using a dishtowel, she wrapped the handle of the kettle, then poured the steaming water into everyone’s mugs. Clark added three spoonfuls of sugar into the massive mug before him and played with the tea bag’s string for a long moment before deciding it had steeped enough and fishing it out of the water. He curled both hands around the hot mug, enjoying the calming warmth that seeped out into his fingers and palms.
“I hope they were good memories,” Martha said as she selected a cookie and put it on her plate.
“Well…” Clark hedged, uncomfortable. “To be honest, and to keep it short, one thought led to another and pretty soon I was thinking about the conversation I had with him…the last one I had with him…just before Lois was supposed to marry Lex Luthor.” He shot her an apologetic look, hating to bring up her aborted wedding, wondering if she still harbored any pain from it.
She shook her head. “It’s okay. I barely even think about it,” she assured him softly. “It was a long time ago. Ancient history.”
He nodded, then ducked his head down in shame. “Thinking about that conversation…I remembered how much I didn’t want you to marry Luthor. It…remembering all of that…it jarred something loose in my head. Some mental block came crashing down and I…” He shuddered, feeling terribly cold all of a sudden and small and vulnerable. He swallowed again and brought his gaze to the strong, dark liquid in his mug. “I know what happened to me. I remember it all. Why I disappeared. Where I was. What happened before I was sent to have my brains fried in Gotham City.”
“Clark? You’re shaking,” Lois said, concerned. She reached out and placed a hand over his wrist, though he never let go of his tea.
“It was him, Lois. He’s the reason…he’s the one behind it all,” Clark said, his voice thin and haunted.
“Him?” she asked, as if needing confirmation.
“Luthor. He’s the one who stole twenty years of my life.”
“Are you sure?” Lois asked slowly, and Clark wasn’t entirely sure if she believed him.
“Positive,” he said without hesitation. “I remember it all now. He contacted me and asked me to send Superman his way if I saw him. He said he was worried about you. So…I went. I was worried that you were in some kind of trouble. Given how…distant…we’d become at the time, I didn’t trust that you’d call me if something was wrong. It was all a lie. He had a cage made of Kryptonite and before I knew it, I was his prisoner, and there was literally nothing I could do about it. I was weak, powerless, heartsick, and terrified.”
He gulped and absently took a sip of his tea, oblivious to how hot the water still was. He no longer saw the kitchen. He was firmly back in Luthor’s wine cellar.
“He kept me in the wine cellar,” he went on, smelling the odor of wines and wooden casks, seeing the reflected light on the bottles stored there. “He knew I was Clark. I don’t know how he figured it out. But he knew and he promised me that he’d kill every last person I cared about unless I admitted it. I refused at first but I knew he’d do what he said he’d do. So…I admitted that he was right. That’s when the torture started. He had Nigel do his dirty work…most of the time. Once in a while he’d get…inspired…and join in. But he liked crippling me with the Kryptonite best. He used it enough to permanently disable my powers, not that I could recharge…I need sunlight to do that and he kept me in a room without so much as a single shaft of natural light.”
He toyed with his mug, then took another, albeit shaky, sip. “He broke me,” he whispered ashamedly. “After a while…he kept me in the pitch black for long periods of time. He had a recording that played on a loop, never stopping. I wasn’t Clark Kent. I’d never been Clark. I was Superman. I…held out, as long as I could. But I guess it wasn’t enough. Somewhere along the line, I started to believe it.”
“Oh, God, Clark,” Lois gasped while Martha made a strangled cry.
He nodded distractedly. “I tried. I really did. But Luthor made Guantanamo look like a day camp. I barely slept. I was starving. There was constant pain from my bones being broken and rebroken before they could even have a chance to heal. Beatings. Kryptonite sickness. That constant verbal reminder that I was Superman, would only ever be Superman.”
He was shaking like a leaf now and on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. “He said, when it all started, that he was going to utterly erase me from history. Maybe he felt like Clark was the bigger threat to him. I don’t know. But, whatever his reasons, he targeted Clark first until I’d forgotten who I was and grew to be afraid of the name even if I didn’t really remember why. Because, at some point, I started to give him exactly what he wanted. He’d ask who I was and I would say Superman instead of Clark. But the torture didn’t stop. It only got worse.”
He let go of his mug to pinch the bridge of his nose and rub the corners of his exhausted eyes. “For ten years, that was all I knew, until one day he shipped me off to the asylum so that Superman could be purged from me as well, leaving behind an empty shell.” He shrugged helplessly. “You know all the rest.”
“I’ll kill him,” Lois vowed.
Clark shook his head. “No. We have to be smart about this. He’s tried to erase me. And I guarantee he’s behind the failed assassination attempts. We need to be subtle and take him down in a way he won’t see coming.”
“Just tell me how you want to handle it,” Lois said grimly.
“I will, just as soon as I can process this all and think clearly about the course ahead,” Clark replied, staring moodily into his tea.
“What I can do to help?” Martha asked, reaching over and patting his wrist.
He frowned. “I’m afraid there’s not much you can do, Mom. Laying low is probably the best thing you can do. Because, if Luthor figures out that I remember what he did, I don’t want you getting caught in the line of fire.”
To Be Continued…
